


Lore

by bacchante



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Multi, Rating May Change, Supernatural Elements, staring at these tags wondering what i'm doing with my life, werewolf pack!survey corps, witch hunter!eren, witch!armin, witch!levi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 18:19:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1788622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bacchante/pseuds/bacchante
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“There’s no such thing as faeries,” Eren told him one day when they were at school. Eren was a doctor’s son, so Armin supposed he should know; but then why did everyone avoid the Wightwood? If the Folk didn’t exist, then it was just a forest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> rereading the bloody chamber and rewatching the snk anime has lead to...whatever this is? discordant eremins and eruris in a modern fairytale kind of story. so heavily AU it barely counts as fic, really. enjoy.

The Wightwood is an old forest, and the roots of its trees run deep. It is dense, thick with old evergreens and the bed of needles covering the floor of the wood, so that sound doesn’t travel far and its dampened echoes can be deceiving. In the green and gloom one can convince themselves of almost anything; a breeze becomes a sigh, the flicker of a fox’s tail becomes a red-cloaked person running four-legged through the underbrush. It’s not surprising that the place has inspired so many fantastical tales, told time out of mind: the Wightwood is a fae place, the Wightwood is to be avoided. But village children are fearless, and they grow into hardy adults.

The village: only one, between the Wightwood and the town of Banworth End. The carved wooden sign at the side of the wide dirt road reads ‘Welcome to Mercy’, and makes no mention of the ancient, sprawling forest that marks its northern border. There are two schools, one for the younger children and one for the teens; there’s an array of shops on the single main street, which has been briefly described in the travel brochures as ‘quaint’. There is a pub and an inn, a veterinary clinic, a café, a gas station. The record store is new and no one would be willing to bet on its longevity. There is a bookstore, an old, narrow building squeezed in between the tobacconist and the post office, and time out of mind, the sign outside it has read ‘Arlert’s Lending Library & Bookshop’. There is an open fire in the front of the store, and in winter, it blazes from sunrise to sunset.

When Armin Arlert is seven years old, his grandfather teaches him to properly bank the fire before going upstairs for the night, a defence against the Folk of the forest and the surrounding farmland. Armin’s father scoffed fondly to see him following this piece of advice with the wide-eyed fervour of a credulous child, but his mother only smiled.

“There’s no such thing as faeries,” Eren told him one day when they were at school. Eren was a doctor’s son, so Armin supposed he should know; but he was still careful to bank the fire, just in case. If faeries weren’t real, well and good; but then why did everyone avoid the Wightwood? If the Folk didn’t exist, then it was just a forest.

Eren said there was no such thing as magic either, and this Armin _knew_ to be untrue, but he had been cautioned by his mother never to speak of the strange miracles she performed when they were home alone, so he said nothing. His mother said it was a rare gift, and Armin must keep the knowledge of it close. She watched with solemn eyes as the hardened wax on her scrying mirror melted and pulled towards her son’s tiny fingertips when he reverently touched the rim of it. Keep it close, she repeated, and gathered his hands in her own.

When Armin was eight years old, his parents went into the Wightwood and never came out again. He knew, then, that it wasn’t just a forest. He banked the fire carefully and watched the road every night for four months afterward. His grandfather seemed almost relieved when Armin finally gave up his nightly post at the window, but Armin knew he’d never really stop looking for their return. His mother was a cunning woman—a witch, he knew the word now, though she’d never said it herself—and her gift was a hundred times stronger than his own; she could protect herself if she needed to, and his father, too. He had read the same stories about girls in forests as every other child had, but his mother was no one’s meat. He still lay awake some nights, listening, waiting for the door to open and for their voices to come ringing up the stairs.

Two days after Armin’s tenth birthday, the rift opened, and the world shifted. A fault line in the Pacific Ocean split wide and spilt forth its mysterious bounty, a palpable but ill-defined energy that caused such a surge in supernatural activity the world over that no reasonable person could deny any longer that the old stories, the legends and lore, were born of something real. Armin knew, in a sense; he didn’t know the _why_ of it, but he felt it, an abrupt buzzing beneath his skin, more powerful and more insistent than he had ever known it to be. Physicists had theorised and debated over the exact nature of the rift and the reasoning behind its effects on the preternatural denizens of the planet, but in human communities the world over, fear stirred. As is so often the case, fear overtook curiosity; and the Hunter’s Council was born.

Officially, the Council was dedicated to eradicating, neutralising, banishing or otherwise incapacitating forces and creatures of a supernatural or non-human nature, or creatures displaying supernatural abilities. This included (to date) faeries of all descriptions—solitary, Seelie, or Unseelie—as well as shapeshifters, lycanthropes, chimerical creatures, demons, any variety of the undead, and, of course, witches. That the vast majority of these were unable to correct their non-human nature even if they were willing was a non-issue: they were viewed as a threat, and threats must be dealt with.

Some supernatural creatures _were_ , in fact, nothing more than a threat to humans. Drownings had become commonplace as the things inhabiting rivers and lakes awoke with a vicious appetite. The fae, and those of the Unseelie court in particular, were dangerous in the extreme to humans foolish enough to become entangled in their wars and politics. Theoretically, witches were capable of malice—like any other person—but witchcraft could be bent to any task, if the practitioner was skilled enough. Armin thought of his mother: soft-spoken and fair, tracing wards on his ankles with a fingertip before she let him out to skate on the nearby frozen pond; making his bruises and grazes vanish with a strong-smelling homemade ointment and a few whispered words he could never catch. His mother had been anything but malicious. His mother was the last person in the world who would have deserved to be hunted.

Armin was eleven when Eren’s mother disappeared, too. Armin watched helplessly as Eren railed against the Folk of the wood, biting his tongue on warnings against speaking so harshly of them—it drew their attention, or so they said, and ‘so they said’ was as good as scientific theory these days. “I’m going to kill them all,” Eren swore, and Armin couldn’t tell whether his tears were born of sorrow or fury or passion, or all three at once. “Every one of them.”

Armin was twelve when Eren left Mercy with his father, bound for the southern city of Dunveldt. Grisha Jaeger had taken a job at a hospital, and Eren went to begin training as a Hunter with all the grim determination of the gravely wounded. He held Armin’s hand and swore he’d come back someday. Armin no longer doubted anything Eren swore to. For the first time in his life, he wished he wasn’t his mother’s son. He wished he wasn’t something to be hunted by fiery-eyed boys who held his hand and made him feel as if he were falling from a great height. The missing of him was a slow ache that settled deep in his bones alongside the pain of his parents’ absence, and Armin hoped he would never come home.


	2. A Town Called Mercy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahaha i'm so insecure about this chapter bye

**Seven Years Later**

A newcomer had moved into the old Turner place at the edge of the Wightwood. What kind of person would be crazy enough to buy that crumbling old place, with its troubled history and a back porch that looked out right onto the moss-blackened trees of the Wightwood, was anyone’s guess. The whole of Mercy was abuzz with guesses, as it happened, and Armin had already heard half a dozen wild rumours from his station behind the counter of the bookstore. As far as he could tell, no one had actually laid eyes on the man except for old Alan Turner, who had moved out of the house years ago, as soon as the new one was built on his bit of acreage just outside the village.

“Glad to be rid of it,” he told Armin, and Armin nodded understandingly. It had been no secret that the house had been on the market forever and a day. “Never thought anyone’d want it. He’s a funny little fellow that bought it.”

Armin took his time bagging the books. Small town gossip is worse than a habit, it’s an addiction, and Armin was as small town as it got no matter how many books he read. “Funny as in strange,” he said mildly, “or funny ha-ha?”

The old man chuckled. “Both,” he said cryptically. He was small town, too; he wanted to see how hard Armin was willing to work for details.

Armin didn’t rise to the bait. If there was a newcomer in town, it wouldn’t be long before they were forced to venture onto the main street. Maybe the man would prove to be a book lover. He let Alan Turner leave with his meagre secrets still held close to his chest, and buried himself in a book as he awaited the next customer.

The bell over the shop door rang. He sat up, rapping his pen nervously on the countertop, but it was only his grandfather. Armin slumped back down onto his elbows and called out a greeting while the old man stomped snow off his boots in the doorway.

“You still here?” he asked, squinting at Armin from under the brim of his hat.

“Someone’s got to watch the shop.”

“Well, I thought you might’ve turned the sign and taken your break. You can go now, if you like. Get something to eat,” he said, flapping his hands at Armin. “You’re skin and bones.”

“I am not,” Armin mumbled, but he went.

The street outside was laden with snow and empty but for a few stray shoppers, rugged up so thoroughly it would have been impossible to tell who they were from a distance. Armin kept his head down against the cold wind and trudged up the road to the one and only coffee shop in town. The Wightwood Café was small, but warm, with an open fire and uniformly tacky velvet upholstery on all the furniture. It was run by an elderly couple who collected unusual teaspoons and had an array of mismatched china on which to serve the homemade food.

Armin got a coffee and a cheese scone before he sat down in what he privately thought of as _his_ chair, a monstrous purple wingback emblazoned with a pattern of what might have been birds but might equally have been horses. The coffee was weak, but it always was here. It was better than nothing. He dug his phone out of his coat pocket and found an unread message from Eren.

Armin felt his heart clench in his chest for an instant when he saw the name. _Don’t be ridiculous_ , he chided himself, and opened the message to read it. It was a response to one he had sent earlier, musing on the possibility of the stranger in town being single and attractive. Armin had just started rereading of _Pride and Prejudice_ , and he had had to resist the urge to let Eren know of this particular piece of backwoods life by saying “Netherfield Park is let at last!” but the odds of Eren knowing what he was quoting or what he meant by it were slim to none.

Eren was in his final year of training to become a Hunter. It was a strange and regrettable circumstance in Armin’s life that his best friend also happened to be the only person he knew who was hell-bent on becoming a hunter of people like Armin—not that Eren knew that, of course. Armin had been hiding his nature from Eren for as long as he’d known him; it came easily to him, but he resented the underlying sense of living in fear of his own friend. It wasn’t as if Eren would ever do anything to _hurt_ him.

Then again. It seemed a dangerous thing to gamble on if he didn’t need to. Besides, it would be selfish to tell Eren; if it got out that Armin was a witch, they’d search his grandfather’s shop, and there were some highly illegal heretical texts on various occult subjects hidden in the roof of the storeroom, which Armin obviously couldn’t have gotten by himself. He couldn’t risk it.

 **Eren** : look i told u u shoulda come with me. the guys here are def ur type

Armin rolled his eyes. A witch training to be a witch-hunter. Brilliant. He sent a response that did _not_ mention that particular train of thought, and finished his food before heading back to the bookstore. His grandfather let Armin reclaim his seat behind the counter and dig his book out from his bag before he shuffled into the office, muttering about paperwork.

The bell over the shop door rang. Armin looked up from his book, and found that the newest addition to the village had decided to wander into the shop.

His fingers itched for his phone.

He was probably the shortest adult man Armin had ever seen. Even Armin was taller than him, if only by a few inches, and the man had to be a good ten years his senior. His dark hair was worn in a severe undercut, sort of military-circa-1995, and he had a small, heart-shaped face—he was attractive, Armin supposed, but he looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He was frowning slightly, as if the act of walking slowly between the shelves of a cosy little bookstore was stressful for him.

“Hello,” Armin said automatically. The man glanced up at him, and his eyes narrowed as he took Armin in. Armin fought a blush and tried to think what he would normally say. “Looking for anything in particular?”

The man hesitated for a moment. “Fifty Shades of Grey,” he said finally, looking pained.

The title was familiar, of course. In a place like Mercy it hadn’t been worth the scandal it would have created to actually stock the book in question. Armin felt childish laughter trying to bubble up in his chest, but no, he was a professional. He did _not_ laugh. He didn’t even smile. He maintained complete control of his expression, except for his eyebrows, which he could feel steadily climbing towards his hairline. The stranger’s scowl seemed to darken in direct proportion to the amount of surprise Armin allowed to show on his face, so he struggled to suppress it.

“I don’t believe we have it,” Armin said, very evenly, “but I can order it in for you, if you like?”

“Don’t bother,” the man said.

Armin fell silent. He fumbled with his book, trying to mark his page without dog-earing the paper. He began blindly fishing scraps of receipt paper from the shelf beside him, rushing to jam one between the half-closed pages—“ _Ow_ ,” he mumbled, peering down at the papercut in dismay. It was a good one; blood welled up so fast and in such volume that he caught himself wondering nonsensically if he’d managed to strike an artery. In his index finger. Right. _Idiot_ , he berated himself silently. He looked around for something to wrap it in before he bled all over his book or his jeans.

“Here.”

A white square of cloth entered his vision. The man was leaning across the counter and offering him a pristine handkerchief, one eyebrow arched in distaste.

Armin hesitated, but he supposed it would have been rude to refuse it. He took it and wrapped it tightly around the cut. “Thanks?” It came out sounding like a question.

The man sank down on his elbows, spine arching sinuously between his shoulders like a cat’s, and nodded at the patch of red blooming on the cloth. “You can keep that,” he said flatly, and then paused again, deliberating on what to say next. Armin just sat and stared and pressed the handkerchief hard against his finger, thinking to himself that this man was probably the strangest person he’d ever met. “You know you can fix it, right?” he said finally.

Armin opened his mouth to reply, but no words came. The implications of that question—that the man _knew_ , somehow, that Armin was a witch, that he could tell just by looking at him—crashed into Armin’s consciousness like a spanner into clockwork. He didn’t know how to process it, so he didn’t.

The man made an impatient noise and held his hand out. “Give it here,” he said.

For a second Armin thought he wanted his bloody handkerchief back, but then he realized he was asking for his injured hand. He gave it over without really thinking; his mind seemed to have ceased to function properly, and all his brain was allowing him to do was breathe and follow simple instructions. If he were more himself he’d try to discern whether what he was feeling was crippling fear or overwhelming exhilaration, or both. As it was, he just breathed, and offered his hand.

The man took a firm hold of Armin’s wrist and unwrapped the cloth from his finger one-handed, tsking in disapproval. The cut continued to bleed sluggishly. “What a mess,” he muttered. “Maybe you shouldn’t be working in a bookstore if you can do this to yourself just by picking up a book.”

“It wasn’t really optional,” Armin said weakly. He didn’t have it in him to defend his ability to handle books without hurting himself—he was busy watching the man feel his way down the joint just below the cut with precise, impersonal movements, like a doctor. _Was_ he a doctor? Armin wondered suddenly. He had no idea what the man did.

“So you’re Arlert, huh?”

It took Armin a second to realize that he was talking about the name on the sign outside the shop. “Oh. Sort of. I don’t own the place though, that’s my grandfather.”

The man grunted. He released Armin’s wrist and picked up the handkerchief, avoiding direct contact with the patch of blood. He shook it out and began re-binding the wound, much more efficiently than Armin had.

“I’m Armin,” Armin said, feeling foolish.

“Levi,” the man said. “Hold that.”

Armin obeyed, pinching the material in place. He wasn’t allowing himself to consider what exactly he was doing right now, because it felt a lot like something he should definitely _not_ have been doing, especially in the shop, where anyone could walk in. Levi seemed unconcerned by the possibility, though.

“Close your eyes,” Levi ordered, and Armin stared at him.

“Excuse me?”

“Listen, I’m not really in the habit of going around teaching strange kids how to heal basic injuries,” Levi said brusquely, “but you’ve got the gift rolling off you in waves. Personally I find it embarrassing to watch someone with your potential stare helplessly at a fucking _papercut_. Now close your eyes.”

Armin closed his eyes. The clockwork of his mind had come unstuck somewhere along the line, and now it was in overdrive, parsing out the details of everything Levi was saying, chasing implications and trying to construct a logical explanation for what was happening right now. He was coming up blank. Teaching witchcraft to a strange boy in a store? No matter how he considered it, it didn’t make any sense. It was so risky, but Armin couldn’t bring himself to turn it down.

“How much do you know about human anatomy?” Levi was asking him.

“A bit?”

His trepidation must have shown on his face, because Levi sighed and said, “Relax, it’s skin and superficial veins. Nothing confusing. You know how your hands are constructed, yes?”

“More or less,” Armin hedged.

“Concentrate on that. Start at your knuckles—palms are more complicated and you don’t need the distraction. Follow the bones up to the first joint. Just be aware of them, that’s all.”

Armin breathed out and tried to follow his instructions. He wasn’t sure he was doing it right. When was the last time he’d tried to be aware of his _bones_? Nonetheless, it was easy to imagine them. He built the skeletal image in his mind, up to the first joint, like Levi said. It was a strange exercise, quiet and introverted. He kept getting distracted by other thoughts, ideas— _a witch! a witch! a witch came into the store today_ — _a witch is trying to teach me how to heal_ —First joint. Knuckle to the first joint. Be quiet, concentrate.

“Move up, second joint. Just the bones, nothing else.”

Armin did. He breathed in, pushed his awareness down the length of bone until it met the slick fibrous tangle of tendons at the joint.

“Now go all the way to your fingertips, but, this is the hard part, when you notice that papercut, _don’t do anything about it yet_. Your body is going to want to heal itself and it’s got the means to do it, but it needs guidance, and that’s where you come in. You control it. Don’t give it free rein.”

Armin nodded once to show he understood, and completed the image in his mind down to his fingertips, linking it down to his own hand as he went. The papercut had been throbbing dully up until then, but when he mentally skated beneath it along the bone, it became suddenly, painfully sharp—the exact parameters of it, the shape and feel and taste of it overtook everything else. Warm copper flavour in his mouth, nerves he’d never been aware of before clamouring for him to _fix it fix it fix it_ —the drive to knit flesh back together was as overpowering as it was unexpected. He’d never felt anything like it.

“Kid,” Levi said, interrupting.

“What do I do,” Armin gritted out.

“Breathe,” Levi repeated, which didn’t seem like the most helpful thing he could have said. Armin swallowed his impatience and forced himself to exhale, slowly, carefully. “You’ve got the wound now, right?”

“I think that’s _all_ I’ve got,” Armin said.

“That’s good.”

“It’s _loud_.”

“I know. Don’t worry about that—right now you’re gonna get hold of the blood vessels surrounding it. They should be right there. Grab onto them.”

“How?”

“Just try.”

Armin tried, not really expecting it to work, but then he felt the pressure translating in real time to his own flesh: an unsettling sort of numbed-out _pull_ that instantly had his nerves protesting the unfamiliarity. A small, mundane part of him was whispering that this was _wrong_ , that this shouldn’t happen, that he should stop and push this ability as far down as it would go. He ignored it and hung on.

“Feel how they’re pulling together?”

“Yes.”

“Let them. But guide it. Don’t rush it. Your skin doesn’t know what it should look like when it’s healed, but you do.”

Armin took a deep breath. He’d never done anything near this delicate with his magic before, and he wasn’t sure how it would react if he tried to push it in a particular direction. Generally it was just an ever-present buzzing, prickling force beneath his skin, one he did his best to ignore and restrain. He had never tried to _use_ it.

But this man, a witch like his mother had been, was telling him to do it, telling him he _could_. So he tried. He let his grip on the living flesh slip a little, let it touch and bind with startling speed. It wasn’t a large cut, nor was it very deep; it healed quickly, as easy as breathing. Simple.

Armin dropped his hold on the handkerchief, let it fall away. He tried to still his trembling enough to examine the tiny pink scar that was the only remnant of the papercut. “I did that,” he said stupidly.

“Congratulations,” Levi said, and that dry tone was back. “It’s neat work for your first time. That _was_ your first time?”

Armin’s blush was answer enough. There was a heavy silence; neither of them seemed to know what to say. Armin had a tendency to babble when he was nervous, though, so the silence only lasted until he recalled what Levi had originally come in for.

“Fifty Shades of Grey,” he blurted out. Levi stared at him blankly. “The book you wanted,” he clarified. “Are you sure you don’t want me to order it in for you?”

“Jesus, no.” Distaste showed clear on his face. “I was asking for a friend. I’m not that eager to get it for them. They like to read aloud sometimes.”

Armin’s curiosity was immediately piqued. “I wondered if you’d be living alone in that big old house,” he said without thinking, and then felt his blush deepen to an almost painful extent as he realized what he’d said.

“You know where I live.” It wasn’t a question.

“It’s a small town,” Armin said defensively. “ _Everyone_ knows where you live.”

“Fuck me dry,” Levi muttered. Armin wondered briefly what that even meant. “I hope you have more sense than to gossip about _that_ ,” Levi said, nodding at the scar on Armin’s finger.

“Of course,” Armin said, stung. “I’m not an idiot.”

“Good,” Levi said, with an air of finality. He was backing up toward the door already, hands raised, disentangling himself from the whole messy affair of the local boy’s illicit witchcraft. “See you around, kid.”

“My name is Armin,” Armin said, but he was talking to himself; Levi was gone.

He tried to settle back into _Pride and Prejudice_ , but it was a futile effort. He couldn’t prevent his mind from drifting back to the extraordinary encounter. Another witch in a place as small as Mercy!

Armin felt a sudden, unexpected bolt of longing for his mother. If she were still around, if the Wightwood had never swallowed her up, she would teach him what she knew. He was certain that what she hadknown of her craft was not insignificant. He had never met another witch to compare—not until today, anyway—but hardly a day had gone by when he was a child without her demonstrating her abilities in some small, useful way. She had made great use of wards, he remembered, and homemade ointments and tinctures composed of ingredients he’d been too young to make note of. He wondered who had taught her. Was it possible she had been self-taught? What about Levi, who talked so confidently on the subject of healing and commented on Armin’s potential?

He was so absorbed in his thoughts, it took him a moment to realize his grandfather was speaking to him. “Sorry?” he asked belatedly.

“I said, did anyone come in?” Armin’s grandfather had a habit of falling asleep at his desk; he was standing in the doorway to his office, blinking and cleaning his glasses on the edge of his sweater.

Armin considered the idea of explaining the whole bizarre encounter, and then dismissed it. “No,” he lied, “no one.”


End file.
